Welcome to REID’S READER, a site renewed weekly and devoted to the appreciation and discussion of books old and new by bibliophile, critic and reviewer Nicholas Reid. Each week REID’S READER offers Something New, Something Old and Something Thoughtful to readers and browsers. REID’S READER will sometimes feature guest reviewers and will sometimes offer general book news, but it does not run publishers’ publicity material.
We would be grateful for any donation you can make by way of Paypal.

Monday, November 19, 2012

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, Nicholas Reid recommends "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published five or more years ago.

“THE MISSIONARIES” by Norman Lewis (first published 1988)

Reading Ben
Stubbs’ travel book Ticket to Paradise
reminds me of another book that makes strong reference to Paraguay.

It is
sometimes bracing to read a book that is lop-sided, biased, very selective in
its presentation of material and yet sincere and making a genuine case with
genuine evidence. A work of advocacy, in other words.

The Missionaries, subtitled in some
editions God Against the Indians, is
one such book. It was one of the later books of the veteran British novelist
and travel-writer Norman Lewis (1908-2003), who died at the ripe old age of 95,
nine years ago. The Missionaries was
written when Lewis was about 80. The cover of the paperback edition I have on
my shelves promises an expose of genocide-practising missionaries among the
South American Indians, and part of the book is indeed that. It eventually
focuses on the Panare tribe of Venezuela and the Ayoreos of Paraguay. But
somehow the blurb on the cover is misleading – this is not a systematic
facts-and-figures expose, but an autobiographic volume clearly culled by Lewis
from years of travel and travel-writing, not all of which was necessarily
undertaken as research for this particular topic of missionaries.

Lewis’s
chronology is a little confusing as he buzzes through his own various voyages.
Some of it clearly refers to events from the 1940s and 1950s, as Lewis recalls
time spent with the Montagnard tribes in old French-controlled Vietnam; or his
visit to a shaman in Mexico. Other parts clearly date from the 1970s (the awful
round-ups of Indians in Paraguay) and the 1980s (his visit to the peaceful
Panare, with their culture now subverted.)

The clear
villains of the piece are, in Lewis’s account, American Protestant evangelicals
and fundamentalists. To set the scene for what he has to report of modern South
America, Lewis quickly recaps on the work of the evangelical London Missionary
Society in the Pacific in the nineteenth century. In Lewis’s version, they
deliberately set out to undermine the local cultures in order to cause that
social fragmentation which would make it less possible for indigenous peoples
to resist Christianity as a unifying force. One of Lewis’s set-pieces is his
account of a Pacific chieftain, in the nineteenth century, being made dependant
on alcohol by the LMS so that he would be more pliable in allowing the
missionaries free rein over his subjects.

After this
sort of prologue, Lewis then turns to modern South America. He examines
Protestant-fundamentalist-run outfits such as the New Tribes Mission and the
so-called Summer Institute of Linguistics, which is less disingenuously called
the “Wyclife Bible Translation Society” elsewhere. It genuinely studies
indigenous languages, but with the sole aim of producing translations into them
of Protestant versions of the Bible. The fundamentalists’ basic philosophy is
that the Indians’ souls must be “saved”, even if the Indians are killed and
their society destroyed in the process.

At one
point Norman Lewis quotes them: “ ‘He
comes’, as the missionaries never cease to quote, ‘not that Man shall
continue to live in the world but that he shall be with him in the hereafter’.
The unimportance of a comfortable, earthly life, weighed in the balance of the
threat of eternal punishment in the next life, inspires many missionaries to
gather souls at all costs, often with disregard for the converts’ welfare in
this world.” (Chapter 7)

For Lewis,
this suggests that Protestant fundamentalist missionaries have an undeclared
dualism, almost Manicheism – all that is not of Christ (and this includes
Indian customs) must be of Satan and therefore must be eradicated.

Lewis is
clearly an agnostic, but in his account, the Catholic Church comes through
quite favourably. Lewis does have some negative comments (generally relating to
Catholic missions among Indians many centuries ago) but he understands that by
and large modern Catholic missionaries have worked out a religious co-existence
with the tribes, often join anthropologists in protesting against the
destruction of tribal cultures and habitats, and understand the concept of
“inculturation” in their preaching. Liberation theology and the strong strain
of social justice in South American Catholicism mean that the Catholic Church
is frequently at odds with tyrannical governments and dictatorships; whereas,
for over half-a-century, Protestant evangelicals from the United States have been
quite happy to work hand-in-glove with dictatorships and with logging companies
which destroy the rain-forests, so long as they can have access to the human
material they wish to convert. Claiming to be apolitical, the evangelicals are
in fact highly political. They are spreading the influence of American cash
colonialism and dependence on consumer goods.

The Missionaries is as much a lament as
a protest. There is something extremely elegiac in its final description of a
Panare fish-hunt. Lewis was aware that this life he was describing would
shortly no longer exist.

There are,
however, some anomalies in the book. Given the
subject matter and Lewis’s sympathies, it is odd how old-fashioned
Lewis’s tone often sounds. We have to remember that Lewis was already an old
man when he was writing. Somehow it is an antique style of travel-writing in
which the author never disguises his awareness that he is bringing exotic
wonders and sights to his Western readers. Sometimes, too, we have the sense of
the privileged traveller not always revealing clearly why he is at any given
scene which he describes. And occasionally Lewis is not aware of how much his
own presence signals social change for the indigenous people he champions.

Lewis is a
Westerner, sympathising with the Indians but not sharing their beliefs. We are
told that one of his companions has been adopted by an Indian mother, but the
way Lewis repeatedly refers to the man’s “fictive
Indian mother” suggests that he himself does not fully accept or recognize
this (non-European) relationship. One wonders too if Lewis is a little sanguine
about the supposedly peaceful co-existence of Indians and miners before the
murderous Protestant missionaries moved in.

Some years
ago, as part of gaining a theology degree with a major in church history, I
undertook a paper on nineteenth century Protestant missionary endeavour. I
remember one lecturer becoming very annoyed when I mentioned Lewis’ book, and
saying that its sections on the LMS were very selective. He was probably right.
There is by now a long history of stereotypical depictions of 19th
century missionaries as cultural wreckers. At its crudest it can be seen in
best-selling pop-novels like James A. Michener’s Hawaii; but it was also present as early as Herman Melville’s
supposed travel book Typee in the
1840s (in which Melville pretended that his brief three-weeks stay on a Pacific
island was the extensive experience of four months).

The image
was set of harmless “natives” living an idyllic life which was being disrupted
by missionaries’ threats of hellfire. Often, too, those Westerners who most
loudly damned missionaries’ cultural predations (Melville, Gaugin etc.) were
themselves bringing “corrupting” Western influences into indigenous societies.
Frequently missionaries were mitigating the harm already being done by traders,
sailors, gun-runners, European settlers and others who were already destroying
non-European societies before the missionaries had arrived or made any impact.

Nevertheless,
even after taking all this on board, I still find convincing Norman Lewis’s
account of Protestant fundamentalists at work in South America. One terrifying
aspect is the evangelicals’ clear obliviousness to how they are cultural missionaries as much as
religious missionaries. They assume that they represent Christianity and
“normality”. They never stop to reflect that their own culture and its values
are not noticeably Christian; and that they are more the advance guard of Coca
Cola, Fox News, wage dependence and consumerism than they are spreaders of the
Gospel.

What they
need is a damned good dose of the concept of inculturation – but you won’t find
that taught in any fundamentalist college.